A quick thought before dashing off to teach film--

Nonclickable hypertextual relationships, such as a poem's allusions to other texts, depend on the reader's knowledge or willingness to acquire knowledge of those other texts. Made clickable, can such intertextual references really be called "allusions" anymore? I don't think allusions disappear in webbed poetry--after all, the poet can choose *not* to make them clickable, or to burrow her textual wormholes via *other* gates--but it does seem to me that they become something *other* than what traditional definitions delineate. I wonder to what extent hyperlinks, so apparently freeing, actually determine reading, circumscribing it in hitherto unanticipated ways--if two words are on the page, and one is linked while the other isn't, will a reader ride that link without noting the unlinked word's multiplicity of meanings? Do literal layers marginalize, even erase, subtler ones? I also wonder to what extent hyper/webbed composition makes authorship more potentially authoritarian than ever. And no, I'm not a disciple of Sven. A tad Myronish (Myronic? Tumanesque? <grin>) maybe, but happily--somehow *inevitably*-- at home, as others have noted, in this realm.

Kathy at C.O.D.